Western and Chinese landscape painting Research Paper

Western and Chinese landscape painting - Research Paper Example The essay "Western and Chinese landscape painting" compares Western landscape painting with Chinese landscape painting. Most of these landscapes do exist up to now because they were and are still being used as archeological sites. Although landscape painting is believed to have been practiced all over the world, it is the Western and Chinese landscape paintings that are more predominant in archeological sites and art galleries that focus on landscape painting. Western and Chinese cultures depict a wide range of landscape painting. In most paintings, the background always contains a physical feature. In China, this is always accompanied with a waterfall or a mountain while in the West it is accompanied by rivers and lakes . To discus more about Western and Chinese landscape paintings, we will use landscape painting (1), Poet on a Mountain c. 1500 by Shen Zhou, to represent Chinese culture, as well as landscape painting (2), Poppies Blooming by Claude Monet to represent the Western cul ture. In Chinese culture, landscape painting was inspired by philosophy, represented by pure landscape and devoid of human life. Most of the landscapes were based on imaginary sceneries, such as mountain, but there was a common problem in bridging the gap between the foreground and background, or objects in far range. To solve this problem, most Chinese painters used a dead ground or the use of mist. However, in Chinese culture, there was a slight difference between the East and West Asia in the landscape paints.; in West Asia there was the classification of art according to its prestige and cultural value. This practice was known as hierarchy of genres while in East Asia the form of mountain-water ink was the most common and valued form of landscape art. East Asia dealt with imaginary landscape while the West painters dealt with history painting. With time, they required landscape painting and a poem inscribed on the painting with the use of figures to make landscape look more reli gious. A good example is one of the Chinese masterpieces by Shen Zhou which combined the painting and the poem as a religious saying: â€Å"White clouds encircle the mountain waist like a sash. Stone steps mount high into the void where the narrow path leads far. Alone, leaning on my rustic staff I gaze idly into the distance. My longing for the notes of a flute is answered in the murmurings of the gorge5." In Western culture, landscape painting philosophies were based on religious practices and carried significant spiritual weight. Also in the Western culture, artists tried to make the landscape art as real as possible6. In Chinese culture, their landscape painting aesthetics involved a lot of white or blank space, which allowed the observer to fill the void with his or her own imagination enabling different viewers to have different view of the painting, as this will depend on what or how they decided to fill the void. In addition, the Chinese landscape painting allowed the viewe r to focus on a particular image, as most of the paintings were usually blank, as in filled with mist or fog, to scrap the unwanted information, and with focused imagination allowed the observer to express his or her fillings to the image easily. In Western culture, landscape painting aesthetics included all the details that a naked eye could see when looking at a scene and this was to help the viewer to feel as if he or she was present t